Online payment technologies have been widely applied to allow customers to make payments using credit cards or bank cards on a third-party platform (e.g., an online shopping system). A customer registers a user account on the third-party platform, and this user account is often linked with one or more payment cards associated with the customer. When financial transactions are implemented on this third-party platform, online payment requests are made from this user account to a corresponding financial institution that issued one of the payment cards. When the financial institution authenticates information of the payment card and the customer, the corresponding financial transactions are approved, and the requested payments continue to be processed for this specific user account on the third-party platform. Given the wide application of such financial transactions these days, it is essential to establish a method to conveniently link a user account with one or more payment cards associated with a specific customer.
Typically, a customer has to manually enter information regarding his or her identification and payment cards. A respective financial institution verifies the received identification and payment card information with a record that was prepared when the corresponding payment card was issued to the customer. Upon a positive verification, the financial institution sends a confirmation notice to the third-party platform. Then, the user account is allowed to be linked with this specific payment card associated. However, the payment card information normally involves a long sequence of numbers, and it takes efforts to enter the payment card information correctly without any error. Entering the long sequence of numbers can impose more challenges, when more and more payment requests are made from mobile devices that have small touch keyboards, and inevitably slow down the linking process between the user account and the payment cards. Furthermore, the linking process could be further slowed down, when some financial institutions also require information on a user identification card for the purposes of verifying the payment card information. Therefore, there is a need to conveniently link a user account on a third-party platform with a payment card issued by a financial institution without compromising the security of the corresponding user information and payment card information.